Mayflower II (2020) poster

Mayflower II (2020)

Rating:


Canada. 2020.

Crew

Director/Photography/Visual Effects Supervisor/Production Design – Dallas Lammiman, Screenplay/Producer – Greg Lammiman, Music – Rick Holets. Production Company – MovieMakers.

Cast

Justin Lewis (Miles O’Rourke), Shawna Pliva (Kate O’Rourke), Stephen Hardy (Rich O’Rourke), Gene Jarvis (Charles Blackney), Rachel Peacock (Jenna O’Rourke), Rich Swingle (Ferris Chapman), Jeremiah McFarland (Emmett Chapman), Ryan-Iver Klann (Roland Burks), Kealey Storris (Guenther), D’Arcy Browning (Solomon Foster), Joel Harder (Wylie), Nathan Clarkson (LeBlanc), Tree Browning (Commander Cousins)


Plot

Miles O’Rourke is introduced by his brother Rich to Mayflower II – a spaceship built by Rich and his cell of radical Christians, which they keep hidden in a field under invisibility shielding. Rich’s group is then raided by armed government agents, overseen by Charles Blackney, who charge them with using a non-standard Bible rather than the officially censored one. After finding their home being raided by Blackney’s forces, Miles and his wife Kate flee and take off in the Mayflower II. They head to Mars, making a landing at an established colony they find there. They are welcomed inside, only to find it is the same totalitarian world that they have fled from.


Since the 1990s, there has been growing Christian Cinema niche market. This consists of films made by Christian believers and marketed to faith-based groups. In recent years, these have even been attaining respectable theatrical releases. Some of these such as Fireproof (2008), God’s Not Dead (2014), Heaven is For Real (2014), Miracles from Heaven (2016) and Left Behind (2014), which even managed to rope in A-lister Nicolas Cage, have enjoyed reasonable box-office success. Quite a number of these have fallen into genre material, featuring miracles, visitations to the afterlife and the like. In particular, there seems a recurrent fascination among these with films about Biblical End Times Prophecies concerning the end of the world, the Anti-Christ, The Rapture etc.

Mayflower II comes from Dallas Lammiman, a Canadian filmmaker who hails from Didsbury, Alberta where he runs a video-making business. Lammiman had previously made the Christian dystopia film Remember (2012) and the comedy My Grandpa Detective (2016). In all of his films, Lammiman performs multiple tasks behind the camera.

My curiosity was piqued by Mayflower II’s off-the-wall premise – “Christians build a spaceship in secrecy to fly off-world and escape a totalitarian society back on Earth.” The title draws obvious analogy to the original Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers fleeing from England to found the United States so they can worship in freedom. (Dallas Lammiman previously also dealt with oppressive totalitarian societies banning religion in Remember). Mayflower II is incidentally also the name given to a modern seaworthy replica of the original Pilgrim Father’s ship, which is berthed at Plymouth.

As with many of the films made under the umbrella of Christian Cinema, the film is killed by the ridiculousness of its premise. A good part of this comes from the vagueness of information given about the world we are in. This is clearly some type of Dystopia that has a hate-on for Christians – it proscribes a censored version of the Bible, while Stephen Hardy is unable to get proper work because of his refusal to comply. All of this seems under the control of Gene Jarvis, although it is not entirely clear if he is the dictator of the world or just a local businessman who is able to call upon armed security detachments to enforce laws. (For some reason, this dystopian world only takes place in a small town and later on Mars, which looks like a giant mall). Jarvis is also engaged in trying to buy up local properties. Here Lammiman gets political on us and associates villain Jarvis with the environmentalist movement ie. he is trying to confiscate local properties to protect society where there is muttering about him using false pretences and being in collusion with scientists who are self-interested and, it is implied, making up claims for their own purposes.

The spaceship launches in Mayflower II (2020)
The Mayflower II launches

Somehow in this incredibly controlled dystopian world, Stephen Hardy has managed to build an entire spaceship in secrecy. Considering how NASA and the cosmonaut program required billions of dollars in funding and extensive testing before ever getting to launch, it seems a major feat of incredulity how Hardy can build a single ship in a field with no attached workshop or testing facilities, let alone how his requisitioning the parts required and especially rocket fuel would not attract the attention of the authorities.

When the Mayflower gets launched, we see that we are in a future where humanity has made it into space – the ship passes a space elevator on the way into orbit (even though there has been no indication that we are in a spacegoing setting before this). Justin Lewis and Shawna Pliva sit back and take a two-week journey to Mars where they are surprised to a colony set up (although soon find that this is run by the same authoritarian system as back on Earth). It seems baffling that a whole colony could be set up on Mars and nobody on Earth know about it.

They return to Earth just as they see some kind of Social Collapse occur – lights going out all across the continental USA – although this never seems to impact on anything subsequently. They then rescue brother Stephen Hardy and several others from his Christian group and take off with them in the Mayflower. Then comes the most ridiculous part where they set off to … it is not clear where. With Mars inhabited by people hostile to them (and probably wanting to arrest them for shooting up the place), where else is there to go? They don’t seem to know either and just set off in the surety that God will lead them (or at least that they can keep going until the amount of oxygen and food supplies in a ship about the size of moderate sized yacht will last some two dozen people).

Part of the conceptual confusions being had may well be due to the fact that what I was watching, a copy freely available on YouTube and elsewhere, was apparently cut from the longer original – the IMDB lists the film’s runtime as 112 minutes whereas all available versions comes in at 75 minutes, meaning the film has been cut of some 40 minutes. Either that or the IMDB listing is erroneous or basing the runtime on an unedited version of the film.

Even outside of that, Mayflower II is not very well made. There is a general competence to the visual effects of the Mayflower II launching and in flight, although some of the digital effects of the surface of Mars are of a more variable quality, especially when Dallas Lammiman tries to stage a Star Wars (1977)-styled dogfight between ships in the canyons on the surface of Mars. The acting is at least serviceable, the sole exception being the terrible performance from Jeremiah McFarland as the whiny teen kid who betrays the group to the pursuers.

(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2020 list).


Trailer here

Full film available here


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